


You Say

by SegaBarrett



Category: Bates Motel (2013)
Genre: Attempted Murder, Gen, Homelessness, Non-Graphic Non-con, Sex Work, Underage - Freeform, Violence Against Sex Workers, violence mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 19:12:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4491402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What brought Bradley back to White Pine Bay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Say

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Bates Motel, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is after a Dirty Little Rabbits song.

The first night that she’s away from home, sleeping on a Greyhound bus, she has a dream.

In the dream she’s back in class, sitting in the back, but she’s sporting her newly-dyed hair and the teacher is confused.

“You’re sitting in Bradley’s seat,” she keeps telling her, narrowing her eyes and refusing to accept it when Bradley tries to tell her that that’s because she is. Bradley, that is.  
She rolls awake, nearly falls into the aisle, and people look at her. They mumble amongst themselves and she’s worried that she’s drawing too much attention to herself. Bad people will find her, the people who know what she did. The people who know what she had to do.

***

She gets off in Boston and wonders, “What now?” 

She has a little bit of money, at least. She wonders if it wouldn’t have been smarter to ask Norman to come with her – hadn’t he said that he loved her? But it wasn’t like he would leave his mom, leave that singing and whatever else they had going on. There was no way he would fake his death like she had. 

In a way, she feels like she’s cruel for doing that. After all, her mother will have to move on without any of her family left, alone and adrift in the world. But Bradley is like that, too, and it’s not like the woman ever really understood her. Bradley had tried to talk to her so many times but the words just never came out. When you really boiled it down, even though they were mother and daughter, they were like two people plucked from a studio audience to be in some game show or another.

They were strangers.

***

She’d hoped there’d be a place for people like her.

There is, sort of, but it’s dirty and dank and creepy and old men keep eyeing her in a way that makes her skin crawl. She thinks to herself that she should have known better, should have paid attention to all those cautionary tales about girls who run away and the kind of trouble they get into.

But those girls didn’t shoot a man in the head, and if those guys catch up with her, this place will look like heaven on Earth.

So she grabs a blanket and tries to find a spot on the floor that doesn’t look like something out of her Biology textbooks, and shoots all the old men a glare. 

***

In the morning she finds a women’s shelter, and it’s slightly less depressing. Slightly.

It’s full of women who look exhausted and tired and most of them have bruises and black eyes, and like they’ve been ripped apart and recombined and have nothing left. All of them seem to be glaring at her, as if she doesn’t belong there. As if she hasn’t suffered; and she hasn’t, not the way they have.

She could explain, but then she’d be telling them too much. She’s not here to make friends or gain approval, after all. She’s here to fade into the woodwork until she can become somebody new. Until she figures out who she wants to be.

***

She has to get out during the day and go do something. They don’t tell her she has to, but she feels that she does, because if she sits around in this place all day she’ll go crazy. Crazier, maybe, because she already feels as if she’s climbing the walls, climbing out of her skin. She can almost see trails and she wishes again that Norman had come with her, just so she’d have somebody to talk to.

She remembers watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a kid, that Buffy had run away from home at some time or another and become a waitress named Anne.  
So that’s what Bradley will do – she’ll use her middle name like Buffy did and it’ll be easy as anything and, she figures, she won’t run into any vampires in the process if she’s luckily. She’s left them all back at home.

Except the first application she fills out – she shortens the horror that is Winnifred to Winnie (even most of her friends didn’t know that was her middle name – apparently it was her paternal grandmother’s or something) – requires a background check, and so does the next and the next. They want to see ID that proves that Winnie Jones is a real person, and of course she can’t prove that she is, because she’s not.

It’s a weird feeling, not being real. But she’s starting to get used to it.

***

So she floats around, up and down the street, figuring she’ll run into a job eventually that’s not going to make her prove who she is, or who she’s pretending to be. She wishes there was some kind of resource, a clearing house. Maybe there’s one online, if she could get to a computer.

She misses all the silly little posts on facebook and Instagram, the selfies, the shots of what dress she was going to wear. Her friends all used to write comments on them and say how good she looked, how sexy she was. She could picture it now – “Bradley, girl, you look great! Really rocking the homeless brunette chic.”

The only reason she doesn’t drown in self-pity is because she’s surrounded by people who have it so much worse. The broken noses, the dead eyes, the tract marks.

She wonders how long before that’s her. Because it’s hard to be out here, alone in the world.

She wonders why Dylan and Norman let her do it.

***

The first time a guy encounters her on the street and waves a stack of bills in the air, she’s horrified and runs for blocks before dipping into a library for safety. Her breath is caught in her throat and she can’t stop hyperventilating.

But she also knows she’s running from the inevitable. 

That many bills could keep her alive… but she doesn’t know how long.

***

The first time she nods and accepts the money blurs into the second, the third and the fourth. It’s all pretty normal – nothing she hasn’t done before with Richard and Norman (another thought of Norman gets her all bent up inside), but then there’s a little rash of the scary ones. The ones that seem like the villains in the horror movies she used to rent when she was a kid.

She’s locked into rooms and closets, hit, pushed to the floor, money thrown at her. Some of them give her pills so she can sleep, and she’s grateful. It doesn’t come easy, not anymore.

She realizes she needs to go after the time the guy strangles her and leaves her on the floor of a motel, thinking she’s dead.

It’s a weird thought. Back home she’s dead already.

She doesn’t want to be dead anymore.

Bradley has enough for a car now. She could drive all day and all night and get back to Oregon.

That is, if she wants to be Bradley again. 

She looks at herself in the mirror and doesn’t recognize who she sees. She doesn’t remember who Bradley even was.

But there’s one person who might.


End file.
